Brazilian police bust $196 million cocaine and cryptocurrency money-laundering gang

Deep Tide TechFlow message: On July 27, according to Bitcoin.com, the Brazilian Federal Police announced that Operation Commodity successfully cracked down on a multinational drug trafficking and money-laundering group. Since 2021, the group has used the port of Rio de Janeiro to conceal more than 6.5 tons of cocaine inside shipments of coffee, cement, and mortar, smuggling it into European countries including France, Belgium, Germany, Slovenia, and Spain.

The group carried out money-laundering activities by using, as tools, a dealership in the Greater São Paulo area that sells luxury cars such as Ferrari, Porsche, Corvette, and Land Rover, along with multiple shell companies, to conceal and obfuscate the flow of funds with cryptocurrencies. During this operation, 13 people were arrested, 44 searches were conducted, and the court ordered the freezing of assets worth nearly 1 billion reais (about 1.96 billion USD). The group is linked to the Brazilian criminal groups PCC and CV, which have been listed by the U.S. Trump administration as “Global Special Designated Terrorist Organizations.”